REVIEW PAPER Curr Probl Psychiatry 2017; 18(4): 259-263 DOI: 10.1515/cpp-2017-0018 In memory of Professor Jan Mazurkiewicz in the 70th anniversary of his death Wspomnienie o Prof. Janie Mazurkiewiczu w 70-tą rocznicę śmierci Aneta Perzyńska – Starkiewicz A,B,E,F II Department of Psychiatry and Psychiatry Rehabilitation, Medical University of Lublin Abstract This article reminisces about the life and career of Jan Mazurkiewicz, one of the most outstanding Polish psychiatrists – the author of Psychophysiological Theory, an original conception of mental disease based on the theory of evolution and dissolution of t he nervous system developed by the Englishneurologist John Hughlings Jackson. Professor Jan Mazurkiewicz was an active organizer of psychiatric care. He was co-founder and director of hospitals in Kochanówka and Kobierzyn. He held the rank of Associate Professor at the John Casimir University in Lviv and the position of Professor at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. From 1919 until his death in 1947, Professor Jan Mazurkiewicz was the head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Warsaw. For twenty three years, starting from 1924, he was the president of the Polish Psychiatric Association. The Mazurkiewicz's Psychopathological Theory provides a natu- ral model of development of the highest psychic functions.Damage to a higher evolutionary level of the nervous system leads to the activation of the previously suppressed lower levels, transformed by the pathogen into psychopathological symptoms.Mazurkiewicz's scientific thought was adopted and developed by his student andthen, collaborator, Professor MieczysławKaczyński,who was later to become the head of the Department of Psychiatry in Lublin. This work discusses the research conducted at Lublin's Department of Psychiatry which expands on Mazurkiewicz's theory Keywords: Jan Mazurkiewicz, psychophysiological theory, dissolution Streszczenie W pracy przypomniano sylwetkę profesora Jana Mazurkiewicza, jednego z najwybitniejszych polskich psychiatrów – twórcy ory- ginalnej teorii psychofizjologicznej, opartej na ewolucyjno –dyssolucyjnej koncepcji angielskiego neurologa J.H.Jacksona. Profesor Jan Mazurkiewicz był aktywnym organizatorem opieki psychiatrycznej. Był współtwórcą i dyrektorem szpitali w Kochanówce i Kobierzy- nie. Pracował na stanowiskach docenta Uniwersytetu Jana Kazimierza we Lwowie oraz profesora Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego w Kra- kowie. Od 1919 roku, aż do śmierci w roku 1947, prof. Jan Mazurkiewicz pełnił funkcję kierownika Kliniki Psychiatrii Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego. Od 1924 roku – przez 23 lata – pełnił funkcję prezesa Polskiego Towarzystwa Psychiatrycznego. Stworzona przez prof. J. Mazurkiewicza teoria psychofizjologiczna, tworzy naturalny, przyrodniczy model rozwoju najwyższych czynności psychicznych. Uszkodzenie wyższego piętra ewolucyjnego skutkuje uwolnieniem się psychizmów niższych, przekształconych przez czynnik chorobo- twórczy do formy objawów psychopatologicznych. Kontynuatorem myśli naukowej prof. J. Mazurkiewicza był jego uczeń a następnie współpracownik, późniejszy kierownik Kliniki Psychiatrii w Lublinie prof. Mieczysław Kaczyński. W pracy wskazano, na rozwijające koncepcję Mazurkiewicza wyniki badań, prowadzonych w lubelskiej Klinice Psychiatrii. Słowa kluczowe: Jan Mazurkiewicz , teoria psychofizjologiczna, dyssolucja The life and career of Professor Jan Mazurkiewicz theory of emotions and integration of higher-order nerv- Professor Jan Mazurkiewicz was born on July 12, ous activities. Subsequent publications formed the foun- 1871. Having received the degree of Doctor of Medicine in dations of the emerging psychophysiological theory and 1896, he enrolled ona postgraduate programme at the became the basis on which Mazurkiewicz was granted the University in Graz and then in Paris. His first publications degree of habilitated doctor in 1909, and 10 years later, appeared in 1900 in Graz and were devoted to the study atitle of the Professor. In parallel with scientific activity, of the anatomical and physiological foundations of mental Professor Mazurkiewicz was actively involved in medical life, which Mazurkiewicz believed was the only legitimate practice. Among others, he organized work in hospitals in direction for scientific development of psychiatry. Kochanówka and Kobierzyn. He presided over the minis- His broad knowledge of the literature of the subject terial Department of Health. In the years 1909–1918, he and his own original clinical thought bore fruit in his held the rank of Associate Professor at the John Casimir monographs, devotedto, among others, the physiological University in Lviv. In January 1919, he was granted the © 2017 Medical University of Lublin. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonComercial-No Derivs licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/) 260 A. Perzyńska – Starkiewicz title of Professor of Jagiellonian University in Cracow. es) which control the functions of an infant up to 2–3 months From October 1919 until his death in 1947, Professor of age. From about three months to two years of age, a child Mazurkiewicz was in charge of the Clinic of Psychiatry of develops reflexively conditioned mechanisms that take con- the University of Warsaw, holding the position of Dean trol over the instincts. The totalitarian thought of postwar and later Rector (President) of his home university. Dur- Poland, which was based on the distorted principles of Pav- ing the Nazi occupation, he was a lecturer on the secret- lov's theory, saw the development of human psychic func- teaching courses for medical doctors. For 23 years, start- tions as being limited to the level of conditional reflexes. The ing from 1924, he was the president of the Polish Psychia- PsychophysiologicalTheory distinguished two further stages tric Association [1,2,3]. of development: the period of intrapsychic, pre-logical activi- During the German occupation, Mazurkiewicz com- ty (3–7 years of age) and the period which lasts from about pleted a two-volume work devoted to the evolution of seven years of age until maturity and is characterized by the higher mental activities (volume one) [4], and dissolution, formation of, as Mazurkiewicz himself put it, "frontally linked the reverse of evolution, which unveils the clinical picture abstract processes ofintentional, causal-logical activity". of disease(volume two) [5]. Mieczyslaw Kaczyński, Mazurkiewicz's student and then, collaborator, noted that this highest evolutionary level in The Psychophysiological Theory man played an "inhibiting, organizing, unifying and control- The English neurologist John Hughlings Jackson, re- ling" role [6,7] with respect to the lower evolutionary levels.A ferred to by Mazurkiewicz as "the father of the world pathogen first damages thephylogenetically youngest struc- neurology", assumed that the basic function of the nerv- tures, i.e. those which are the best organized but at the same ous system, which should be viewed from an evolutionary time the weakest, the least resistant. point of view, was the accumulation and transfer of ener- gy. Jackson considered the individual stages of the nerv- Types of dissolution ous system evolution to represent four levels of dynamic Mazurkiewicz distinguished the following types of men- activity, claiming that the evolutionary process proceeded tal dissolution disorders: psychoneurotic ('intra-level') dissoci- from the simplest automatic functions to more complex, ation, slow dissociation or dissociation proper(schizophrenia), but,at the same time,poorly organized, controlled func- and rapid dissociation ('delirium' – psychosis with impaired tions located in higher brain areas. He believed that this consciousness). According to the Psychophysiological Theory, was the reason why the highest evolutionary areas were the affective diseases do not belong to the category of dissocia- more susceptible to damage. Dissolution (the progressing tion disorders because the lower-level symptoms manifesting disease) damages parts of a higher level (never destroying in the former have a different, 'secondary' pathogenesis. A it fully), what results in negative symptoms. The effect of similar case is the regression observed in dementia which this process is the activation of the heretofore suppressed arises secondary to "deterioration of the anatomic substrate". lower level, which, having undergone a pathological Also other psychoses, such as paraphrenia and paranoia, do change, manifests in the form of the positive symptoms. not display the features of level-by-leveldissolution. Professor Professor Mazurkiewicz transplanted Jackson's evolu- Mazurkiewicz referred to them as "acute or chronic pre-logical tion–dissolution-based approach into psychiatry, assum- psychoses". ing that there existed four developmental levels of mental The creator of psychophysiological theory died on activity. October 31, 1947. Mazurkiewicz's psychopathological theory is based on an analysis of the phylogenetic development of the Elaboration of the Psychophysiological Theory in the biological foundations of higher-order nervous activi- Lublin Clinic of Psychiatry ties.It is recapitulated in a dozen or so years in human A student of Mazurkiewicz and then his associate in ontogenesis and provides a natural model of the devel- the Warsaw Psychiatry Clinic, Professor Kaczyński, con- opment of the highest psychic functions. With its view of a tinued the research started by his mentor. After becoming disease